Management Consultant My Ass
When I started working for this conference company in Los Angeles almost four months ago, I was hired as a Management Consultant. However I am only 33 years old, I look younger, and I don’t have a diploma in Management Consulting or anything related.
So I wrote all my reports, a lot of it has been implemented, but none of the radical changes I suggested were. For that the company went to real high paid professionals, and now I know they are all charlatans.
Today we were finally told about the great changes which are supposed to build teamwork, make the employees happier and make more money for the bosses. I have to say, I was not prepared for what I have heard, I was certain my role and incentive report would have a huge impact on their decisions.
In fact, they decided on the complete opposite and even went further underground. I have no doubt it will fail miserably. This is the Dilbert Principle all over again, I think I need to buy them the book: The Dilbert Principle : Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, and Other Workplace Afflictions, and hope they will read it.
I’m sure that consultant helped tremendously in defining that book, since he claims to have worked for many years in his field, with the greatest corporations out there. Well, these corporations must have been in Utah, and not even in Salt Lake City, but in the suburbs where people have no choice but work in the only company around.
Because the only way I will ever see a bonus, will be if I can keep that job for more than a year. And to be honest, with a turn over of staff like the one I have observed since I have started, this bonus scheme will so obviously failed, you would need to be blind or not want to implement one in the first place, to not see it.
In all, it is all very subjective. I may get a bonus at the end of the year if my Manager feels like it. Well, knowing me and my relationships with all my previous managers, I can already tell you that I won’t get a bonus at the end of the year. So why should I even try?
All I can hope for is a maximum of $2,500 before tax, out of a salary of $60,000 before tax. Do you think I will go out of my way and break my back for $1,250 more after tax at the end of the year, that my Manager might decide I don’t deserve? Are you joking?
I tried to explain to them that a quarterly bonus scheme would be a mistake. It needs to be monthly, especially when over a dozen employees have been sacked or have left since I started. Just to give you a good picture, this company only has 16 employees right now. No one will do any effort to make more money. We are too busy wondering about when we will get the sack, and questioning if perhaps it would not be a good idea to jump ship before then.
So now, all my hard work at selling sponsorship deals, and worrying about who would get the bonus, just went out the window. I am starting a new conference tomorrow, I am supposed to contact 30 potential sponsors. Somehow I think I will forget to call them every day next week, as I am supposed and expected to do. They can lick my ass, I am much more motivated in finding the speakers, get the brochure designed and move on with the next event.
And it gets worse. Not only a huge percentage of my salary goes into taxes, but on top of it something like $500 a month goes into health and dental care insurance. Now there are pushing me to spend another $400 a month on more insurance, because my $500 a month barely covers anything.
As if that was not enough, they have finally implemented a new great scheme supposed to make this company more attractive, that will cost me another God knows how much every month, probably $400. A pension!
I don’t need a pension for a job that I am unlikely to keep for more than a few months, if I am not laid off before I decide to go. I am so crippled with all those social securities that I need to pay, that anyway being Canadian I will never be able to benefit from, that I think I will be lucky if I have any money left to survive at the end of the month.
And to assess if we deserve a bonus at the end of the year, they implemented a wonderful little process that the consultant claims invariably makes the employees happier. Appraisals! Quarterly appraisals!
Apparently communications between you and your Manager is important, it helps build a bond and teamwork. I say appraisals are the tools Managers use to get you sack. The Valley Girl will certainly use it well. They are meetings where they can destroy you and tell you how incompetent you are, and that you don’t deserve your bonus.
Appraisals not only take a lot of time in writing reports and all, time that could be better spent producing events, but on top of it the results are definitely to destroy any remaining relationship you might have with management. It is painful and it does not help. It is like officially filed reports about how bad an employee you are, and will definitely be used against you one day when they no longer require your services. It de-motivates the employees.
By all means, communication is important. Meetings to discuss business are important. But not appraisals, where you Manager ask you how bad you have been, and if you are not honest, he will tell you how bad you are and how you could increase your productivity.
Simple, the only way I could increase my productivity would be to tell me: work on your conferences on week nights and on weekends. This is after all the only way I could work harder, because I certainly cannot squeeze more in a day of work than I am already doing. They have me under so much pressure, I am already stressed to death and work twice harder than I ever did in any other job I had.
The bosses are greedy. They don’t want to give any bonus, that much is obvious. They will only hurt themselves in the end, because by not rewarding me on the money I directly bring them from my extra efforts, I won’t make any extra effort on top of my actual duties to confirm one more sponsor.
It makes no difference to me if there are $20,000 or $100,000 in sponsorship on my event, it only means more work to coordinate all these sponsors and exhibition stands before and at the event.
For my own company, I will be willing to lose 15% to 20% in revenue on any sponsorship deal or delegate people will confirm for me. Otherwise, there won’t be any deal or delegate to speak of. Of course, this is assuming that they would be mostly commission based. Otherwise 7% for sure.
And what kills me about this Management Consultant, is that he came twice, talked with us for one hour, talked with my bosses for a few hours, made us fill a non-anonymous report about how we felt (like if we were to tell the truth in there), and then came back with stupid slides of a PowerPoint presentation that he already had and used in all these other companies he worked for before.
So in the end, not only he costs a lot of money, but on top of it he is laughing at us, since it is obvious that his questionnaire was useless and the talk he had with us was equally useless. He was not interested in any of it, he just came back with what you could find in any management book on the market. And only a few excerpts.
I thought I was incompetent as a Management Consultant, I understand now that I was more than competent. I actually did something, I wrote a dozen long reports, based on my real experience in conference companies. The other consultant did not even write a report, he discussed with the bosses for a few hours. He did not do any research in our company to try to understand it, and he certainly did not gauge the pulse of the office with his questionnaire. He was useless.
And yet, it is his recommendations which will be implemented. And it will take my bosses just a year to understand the failure of it all. Then they will listen to me, to my reports. So I guess it was not wasted after all, even if I will be miles away by then on the other side of the ocean.
In the meantime, I will resume my role of assistant for the Manager, despite my ten years experience in conferences at managing teams and whole departments. I won’t do anything to confirm sponsors and I won’t do any more overtime. They have succeeded in de-motivating me completely. Complete success!
In the meantime, the Valley Girl is working hard at getting rid of the new guy. She has repeated today how unhappy she is with him, how he creates more work for her instead of helping her. And what she had to say about him for when we will go at her conference next week in San Francisco, she could have said about me too. She did not, so it shows how unfair she is to him.
Things don’t change. That’s one employee, that new guy, who certainly won’t see any bonus in his lifetime. He does not even know it yet, how hard the Valley Girl is working at destroying him.
The funny thing is, he is ambitious. Listening to him, he wants to become Director within a year. He took the job because he thought there was place for advancement and promotion. He is only 22 years old, he never really worked before. You can see the problem.
He still thinks that people keep their job for life and become Director in no time. We never get the chance, we are sacked faster than any promotion could ever come. And incentives only create more work with no real and tangible reward. So in the end, they have the opposite effect of what they were intended for in the first place.
So I wrote all my reports, a lot of it has been implemented, but none of the radical changes I suggested were. For that the company went to real high paid professionals, and now I know they are all charlatans.
Today we were finally told about the great changes which are supposed to build teamwork, make the employees happier and make more money for the bosses. I have to say, I was not prepared for what I have heard, I was certain my role and incentive report would have a huge impact on their decisions.
In fact, they decided on the complete opposite and even went further underground. I have no doubt it will fail miserably. This is the Dilbert Principle all over again, I think I need to buy them the book: The Dilbert Principle : Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, and Other Workplace Afflictions, and hope they will read it.
I’m sure that consultant helped tremendously in defining that book, since he claims to have worked for many years in his field, with the greatest corporations out there. Well, these corporations must have been in Utah, and not even in Salt Lake City, but in the suburbs where people have no choice but work in the only company around.
Because the only way I will ever see a bonus, will be if I can keep that job for more than a year. And to be honest, with a turn over of staff like the one I have observed since I have started, this bonus scheme will so obviously failed, you would need to be blind or not want to implement one in the first place, to not see it.
In all, it is all very subjective. I may get a bonus at the end of the year if my Manager feels like it. Well, knowing me and my relationships with all my previous managers, I can already tell you that I won’t get a bonus at the end of the year. So why should I even try?
All I can hope for is a maximum of $2,500 before tax, out of a salary of $60,000 before tax. Do you think I will go out of my way and break my back for $1,250 more after tax at the end of the year, that my Manager might decide I don’t deserve? Are you joking?
I tried to explain to them that a quarterly bonus scheme would be a mistake. It needs to be monthly, especially when over a dozen employees have been sacked or have left since I started. Just to give you a good picture, this company only has 16 employees right now. No one will do any effort to make more money. We are too busy wondering about when we will get the sack, and questioning if perhaps it would not be a good idea to jump ship before then.
So now, all my hard work at selling sponsorship deals, and worrying about who would get the bonus, just went out the window. I am starting a new conference tomorrow, I am supposed to contact 30 potential sponsors. Somehow I think I will forget to call them every day next week, as I am supposed and expected to do. They can lick my ass, I am much more motivated in finding the speakers, get the brochure designed and move on with the next event.
And it gets worse. Not only a huge percentage of my salary goes into taxes, but on top of it something like $500 a month goes into health and dental care insurance. Now there are pushing me to spend another $400 a month on more insurance, because my $500 a month barely covers anything.
As if that was not enough, they have finally implemented a new great scheme supposed to make this company more attractive, that will cost me another God knows how much every month, probably $400. A pension!
I don’t need a pension for a job that I am unlikely to keep for more than a few months, if I am not laid off before I decide to go. I am so crippled with all those social securities that I need to pay, that anyway being Canadian I will never be able to benefit from, that I think I will be lucky if I have any money left to survive at the end of the month.
And to assess if we deserve a bonus at the end of the year, they implemented a wonderful little process that the consultant claims invariably makes the employees happier. Appraisals! Quarterly appraisals!
Apparently communications between you and your Manager is important, it helps build a bond and teamwork. I say appraisals are the tools Managers use to get you sack. The Valley Girl will certainly use it well. They are meetings where they can destroy you and tell you how incompetent you are, and that you don’t deserve your bonus.
Appraisals not only take a lot of time in writing reports and all, time that could be better spent producing events, but on top of it the results are definitely to destroy any remaining relationship you might have with management. It is painful and it does not help. It is like officially filed reports about how bad an employee you are, and will definitely be used against you one day when they no longer require your services. It de-motivates the employees.
By all means, communication is important. Meetings to discuss business are important. But not appraisals, where you Manager ask you how bad you have been, and if you are not honest, he will tell you how bad you are and how you could increase your productivity.
Simple, the only way I could increase my productivity would be to tell me: work on your conferences on week nights and on weekends. This is after all the only way I could work harder, because I certainly cannot squeeze more in a day of work than I am already doing. They have me under so much pressure, I am already stressed to death and work twice harder than I ever did in any other job I had.
The bosses are greedy. They don’t want to give any bonus, that much is obvious. They will only hurt themselves in the end, because by not rewarding me on the money I directly bring them from my extra efforts, I won’t make any extra effort on top of my actual duties to confirm one more sponsor.
It makes no difference to me if there are $20,000 or $100,000 in sponsorship on my event, it only means more work to coordinate all these sponsors and exhibition stands before and at the event.
For my own company, I will be willing to lose 15% to 20% in revenue on any sponsorship deal or delegate people will confirm for me. Otherwise, there won’t be any deal or delegate to speak of. Of course, this is assuming that they would be mostly commission based. Otherwise 7% for sure.
And what kills me about this Management Consultant, is that he came twice, talked with us for one hour, talked with my bosses for a few hours, made us fill a non-anonymous report about how we felt (like if we were to tell the truth in there), and then came back with stupid slides of a PowerPoint presentation that he already had and used in all these other companies he worked for before.
So in the end, not only he costs a lot of money, but on top of it he is laughing at us, since it is obvious that his questionnaire was useless and the talk he had with us was equally useless. He was not interested in any of it, he just came back with what you could find in any management book on the market. And only a few excerpts.
I thought I was incompetent as a Management Consultant, I understand now that I was more than competent. I actually did something, I wrote a dozen long reports, based on my real experience in conference companies. The other consultant did not even write a report, he discussed with the bosses for a few hours. He did not do any research in our company to try to understand it, and he certainly did not gauge the pulse of the office with his questionnaire. He was useless.
And yet, it is his recommendations which will be implemented. And it will take my bosses just a year to understand the failure of it all. Then they will listen to me, to my reports. So I guess it was not wasted after all, even if I will be miles away by then on the other side of the ocean.
In the meantime, I will resume my role of assistant for the Manager, despite my ten years experience in conferences at managing teams and whole departments. I won’t do anything to confirm sponsors and I won’t do any more overtime. They have succeeded in de-motivating me completely. Complete success!
In the meantime, the Valley Girl is working hard at getting rid of the new guy. She has repeated today how unhappy she is with him, how he creates more work for her instead of helping her. And what she had to say about him for when we will go at her conference next week in San Francisco, she could have said about me too. She did not, so it shows how unfair she is to him.
Things don’t change. That’s one employee, that new guy, who certainly won’t see any bonus in his lifetime. He does not even know it yet, how hard the Valley Girl is working at destroying him.
The funny thing is, he is ambitious. Listening to him, he wants to become Director within a year. He took the job because he thought there was place for advancement and promotion. He is only 22 years old, he never really worked before. You can see the problem.
He still thinks that people keep their job for life and become Director in no time. We never get the chance, we are sacked faster than any promotion could ever come. And incentives only create more work with no real and tangible reward. So in the end, they have the opposite effect of what they were intended for in the first place.
posted by Mycroft Holmes @ 8:16 PM
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